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Comet hunter extraordinaire David H. Levy will be the keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Seattle Astronomical SocietyJanuary 27, 2019. The event will begin at 5 p.m. with a social hour and silent auction before dinner at 6 p.m.

Levy has had a hand, or should we say an eyeball, in 23 comet discoveries. Perhaps the most famous one is comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that spectacularly smashed into Jupiter in July 1994. He has written 34 books, mostly about astronomy. Titles include The Quest for Comets, a biography of Pluto-discoverer Clyde Tombaugh in 2006, and his tribute to Gene Shoemaker, Shoemaker by Levy: The Man Who Made an Impact. He has also written for Sky and Telescope, Parade, Sky News and, Astronomy magazine.

Reservations for the banquet are on sale now online for Seattle Astronomical Society members, and will be available to the general public beginning January 6.

Please note: while Seattle Astronomy’s Greg Scheiderer is a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, there’s no official connection between the club and this blog

The Kepler Space Telescope discovered more than 2,600 exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. Kepler used the transit method, watching for tiny dips in the amount of light coming from a star when a planet passed in front of it. After more than nine years in space, Kepler ran out of fuel last month and NASA officially ended the telescope’s science mission. The torch has been passed to a new generation of planet hunters, and experts in the field of exoplanets say we may be less than a decade away from answering one of humanity’s biggest questions: is there life somewhere besides Earth?

Harvard physics Prof. David Charbonneau gave a lecture at the UW Oct. 16. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“We are the special generation that for the first time in human history is going to have the technological ability—if we choose—to go and answer this great question,” said David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a member of the Kepler mission team. Charbonneau gave a lecture recently at the University of Washington, part of the Frontiers of Physics series. He suggests that when we look for an inhabited planet, we don’t confine ourselves to just finding people.

“There may be other humans out there, but I’m going to advocate that we need to create and cast the broadest net possible when we go and actually make the first search for life outside the solar system,” Charbonneau said. He noted that SETI has been listening for years with no contact so far, and other planets are too far away to visit any time soon. But we are on the verge of being able to analyze the chemical content of exoplanet atmospheres, and that can tell us if there’s life on the ground. A scientist on a distant planet looking at Earth could tell there is life here by the chemicals in our atmosphere.

“Life has radically changed the content of our atmosphere,” he said, by creating oxygen and other elements. “We’re going to try to detect life through the unintentional waste products that are produced as life goes about its business.”

News reports of discoveries often note if an exoplanet is “Earth-like,” but in reality we know little about conditions on these far-away worlds. We can accurately figure an exoplanet’s size, mass, and density, but know little else about them. Two new telescopes—one in space, one on the ground—may be able to give us the data we need to know about actual conditions on these planets.

Giant Magellan Telescope

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is being built in Chile by an international consortium, and is expected to begin science operations around 2023. The GMT will be the largest optical telescope ever constructed, with seven 8.5-meter mirrors. This huge telescope will be able to gather an enormous amount of light, enough to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets.

James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a NASA project scheduled to launch in 2021. JWST will have a 6.5-meter primary mirror, and the observatory will be able to observe light in the infrared, and that’s important.

“Infrared is where all the molecules we want to study show their fingerprints,” Charbonneau said, listing oxygen, water, and methane among the molecules of interest.

He said the JWST “will revolutionize essentially all major branches of astrophysics.”

Charbonneau said we need both of the new telescopes to nail down whether an exoplanet is inhabited.

“Individually, a large ground-based telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope cannot tell us if there’s life on a planet,” he said. That’s because they’re sensitive to different molecules. The GMT could spot oxygen, which usually means life. It’s not certain, though, because oxygen could be created in other ways. The JWST could find methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide, which would put that oxygen in context, determining if it’s there because of biological activity.

“The idea is together they can get the data that will allow us to conclude that there really is life,” Charbonneau said.

TESS and MEarth

While we wait for these two observatories to be completed, astronomers are not sitting idly by. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is continuing the work of Kepler, using the transit method to search for more exoplanets.

“Our mission is to find hundreds of nearby small planets amenable to detailed characterization,” said Charbonneau, who is a co-investigator on the mission. TESS will survey the entire sky over a period of two years. It was launched in April, began science work in August, and found its first exoplanet in September. Charbonneau said that by December they should have the data to determine if this new exoplanet has an atmosphere.

Charbonneau is the primary investigator for the MEarth Project, which is searching for habitable exoplanets around nearby stars. MEarth consists of two automated observatories, one near Tucson, Arizona and the other in Chile. Each employs eight robotic 16-inch telescopes that constantly watch M-dwarf stars for transiting exoplanets. There are several good reasons to look at these “red dwarf” stars. They’re plentiful—there are about 240 of them within 30 light years of us, compared to just 20 G-stars like the Sun. Since they’re smaller stars and not as bright, they won’t wash out an orbiting planet’s atmosphere, making the observation technically easier.

The following time-lapse video shows the MEarth-North observatory in action.

NASA turned 60 on October 1, 2018 and last weekend the Museum of Flight hosted a talk by the agency’s chief historian, Bill Barry, as part of the anniversary celebration. Since we all know about the Moon landing, the space shuttle program, explorations of the planets, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and various NASA research and discoveries, Barry focused his talk on six things you may not know about NASA.

#6: NASA science data saved us from disaster

In a day and age when there’s significant distrust of science, it’s interesting to note NASA’s role in solving a difficult environmental problem. Researchers as early as the late 1950s noticed that there was a depletion of ozone in the atmosphere above the South Pole, but it was difficult to document.

NASA chief historian Bill Barry gave a talk at the Museum of Flight Oct. 6, 2018 celebrating the 60th anniversary of the creation of the agency. Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Barry explained that NASA used the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on the Nimbus 7 weather satellite to confirm and map the hole in the ozone.

“It was pretty clear that the ozone hole was big and getting bigger,” Barry said, and that got people’s attention. Scientists postulated that the ozone depletion was caused by chemical reactions with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) such as refrigerants and spray-can propellants, but again it was tough to prove. Observations made from NASA’s ER-2 aircraft and DC-8 Flying Laboratory eventually confirmed that the CFCs were the culprit.

This led to an amazing act of international cooperation on an environmental issue. In the Montreal Protocol in 1987 nations agreed to phase out CFCs and other ozone depleting substances. It’s working; Barry noted that the ozone is gradually recovering.

“Demographers suggest that this action saved us at least two million cases of skin cancer,” since then, he said.

#5: NASA almost didn’t happen

At the dawn of the space age, after Sputnik, the military became keenly interested in spy satellites and possible space weaponry. US Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with the aim of collaborating with academic, industry, and government partners on military programs involving space.

Hugh Dryden was director of NACA from 1947 until NASA was formed in 1958. Photo: NASA

In the meantime over at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) director Hugh Latimer Dryden had pushed the committee’s research agenda toward high-speed flight and space research. In January 1958 he wrote a key report suggesting that space efforts be a collaboration between the DOD, NACA, National Academy of Science, research institutions, universities, and industry. That’s pretty close to the ARPA mission, with a civilian bent.

Barry said that within about a month of the issuance of Dryden’s report, President Dwight Eisenhower went along with it, and sent Congress proposed legislation creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Congress soon approved it.

In the early days of the collaboration there was still arm wrestling over control. A memo from Eisenhower directed that NASA would run all programs “except those peculiar to or primarily associated with military weapons systems or military operations.” The DOD took a broad definition of that—figuring putting people in space was military and so that was within their bailiwick. Eisenhower intervened to clarify that the legislation made NASA a largely civilian organization.

“This key decision on Eisenhower’s part was really important,” Barry said. “NASA in some ways has become the world’s space agency, one of the most positive aspects of US international relations,” and the civilian nature of the agency is vital to that.

#4: NASA is a serial creator of new industries

Barry said smartphone cameras with CMOS chips may be as good or better than DSLR cameras, so we put it to the test. Smartphone pic is on the left. Problems may be due to operator error! Photos: Greg Scheiderer

There’s a common belief that Tang, Teflon, and Velcro were creations of the space program. Barry said those aren’t correct, but a lot of other stuff has NASA origins. Excimer lasers developed for ozone detection proved useful for laser surgery, for example, and the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chips in your smartphone camera were originally developed to build a better camera for space probes. Oddly, those never flew, but they’ve taken off here on Earth. NASA’s annual Spinoff magazine highlights stuff that originated in the space program.

Beyond those, NASA has spun off entire industries. Weather satellites and communication satellites (now a $2 billion/year industry) came from NASA. Under COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) companies such as SpaceX and Boeing are building crewed vehicles and plan to begin testing next year.

“We hope by the end of next year to be launching US astronauts from Florida again up to the International Space Station and paying American companies to do it for us,” Barry said.

#3: NASA revolutionized the understanding of the universe

One’s first response to that is, “Well, duh!” but Barry said it’s easy to take for granted what has happened over the last 60 years.

“We don’t often think about how much things have changed since 1958 when NASA was created,” he said. Sixty years ago otherwise sane people thought there may be civilizations and canals on Mars and dinosaurs on Venus. They figured the outer solar system was just boring ice. There were nine planets; we now know that virtually every star has at least one. We had no idea the Van Allen Belts existed. Now we have a photo of the cosmic microwave background.

#2: Why did we go to the Moon?

President John F. Kennedy wasn’t actually that big on space; in early speeches after he was sworn in he kept proposing that the US and Soviet Union team up on space projects.

The Soviet Union wasn’t too keen on that. They were using the success of their space program to proclaim the superiority of their system and to recruit allies in a world that had been “decolonized” after World War II. The Soviets were winning the propaganda war. JFK wanted a way to beat them without breaking the bank.

Trailing in the game, Kennedy moved the goalposts and declared the race to the Moon.

“The Soviet Union’s success in space was a major strategic strategic problem for the United States,” Barry explained, “so investing money in going to the Moon was a way to prove that the western, capitalist model of government was, in fact, at least as good as if not better than the Soviets.”

#1: The race to the Moon was closer than you think

JFK made his speech to Congress about setting the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” in May of 1961, shortly after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. It wasn’t until years later, with President Lyndon Johnson pushing the goal as Kennedy’s legacy, that the Soviets took notice.

“It’s really obvious by the summer of 1964 that the US was serious about going to the Moon and had the political will and the money to make it happen,” Barry said.

The Soviet response was the Zond program. They wouldn’t orbit the Moon, but would instead fling their spacecraft around it and then return to Earth.

The Soviets made five Zond launches in 1968 had a few successes. Zond 5 in September took some tortoises and other life forms along and landed back on Earth, though in the Indian Ocean rather than on land as intended. Zond 6 made the trip and landed on target in Kazakstan, but its heat shield failed. Tests weren’t going well on the N-1 rocket, the Soviet counterpart to the Saturn V that would be their way of launching people to the Moon. In December 1968 Apollo 8 and three US astronauts orbited the Moon.

“It was pretty clear they weren’t going to get their guys on the surface of the Moon before we did,” Barry said. But the Soviets didn’t give up. They sent up a Hail Mary.

The Soviets had been launching Luna spacecraft since the late 1950s, and in the space of six months they cobbled together a robotic craft that would land on the Moon, collect a few rocks, and bring them to back Earth.

A first launch attempt failed, but Luna 15 blasted off three days before Apollo 11. The Eagle got to the Moon first. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did their Moon walk and were catching a few winks before launching to return to the command module Columbia.

“While they’re sleeping in the lunar module the Soviets fired the retro rockets on Luna 15 and landed on the surface of the Moon. It crashed,” Barry said. But he added that if it had landed successfully, the Soviets may well have been able to get their Moon sample back to Earth first.

“The race to the Moon ends July 20, 1969 after the first Moon walk actually happened,” he marveled. “It was that close.”

Leah Fulmer, who is working at the University of Washington on her Ph.D. in astronomical data science, gave a talk titled, “Data-Driven Astronomy in the 2020s and Beyond.” Fulmer explained that we’re in the midst of a “data tsunami” that’s been growing over the last three decades of astronomical surveys.

In the future this astronomical growth in data collection will continue. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) under construction in Chile will survey the entire night sky every few nights for ten years. It will ultimately collect an astounding 500 petabytes of data—that’s 20 terabytes every single night.

“SDSS had a total data collection of 40 terabytes,” Fulmer pointed out. “We’re going to have one SDSS every two nights in the 2020s. This is a big freaking deal.”

On top of the data, Fulmer noted that the LSST will alert its network when it finds something interesting. Given the amount of data, Fulmer said there will be ten million alerts every night, or about 232 every second.

“This is overwhelming; this is a data tsunami,” she said. “With this sort of data collection astronomers cannot do our science in the way we have up until this point.”

A new way to look at data

Up until recently astronomers would apply for telescope time, make their observations, take the data home, and analyze it. That won’t work in the era of big data for a couple of reasons. First, you can’t jam that much data onto your laptop. Second, there just aren’t enough astronomers to sort through data on objects one by one. As you might guess, we need the help of computers.

“Specifically, we need the help of machine learning,” Fulmer said. This can be both “supervised” and “unsupervised” learning. Astronomers can identify objects by their light curves, and the computers can be taught what those are. That’s supervised. In unsupervised learning, the computers can go out on their own and sort various observations into categories with similar characteristics, and we can figure out what’s in each category.

Once you figure that out, a data broker like ANTARES (the Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System, and yes, astronomers still rule at acronyms) can let the right people know about discoveries in a timely manner.

Fulmer said it’s interesting that ANTARES will never look at the sky, just at data, and that many future astronomers may never visit a telescope, just analyze the data. Different fields can learn from each other about how to process all of this information.

Fulmer finds the era of big data exciting.

“It’s not just data-driven astronomy, it’s data-driven everything,” she said.

Astronomy with your breakfast

N. Nicole Sanchez is working on her Ph.D. in astronomy at the UW, and her research interest is in spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way and how they evolve. This, naturally, led her to think of galaxies as waffles. Thus the title of her talk, “Black Holes, Gas, and Waffles.”

Spiral galaxies form into disks, she explained, and a waffle is a disk. The galaxies have a central bulge, represented on the waffle by a big pat of butter. Marshmallows, suspended by toothpicks, represent globular clusters of stars. Red and blue sprinkles represent old red stars and young blue ones. You just have to imagine the supermassive black hole at the center of the waffle. It may be massive, but it’s super small compared to the size of the waffle.

Sanchez came up with the idea for this model while teaching at the UW in the “Protostars” summer science camp for middle school girls the last couple of years. In the waffle model, syrup represents the gas in the galaxy.

“That’s what you’re making your stars out of, so there’s going to be a lot in your disk,” Sanchez said.

In fact, her faculty advisors got wind of the waffle model and said it would need A LOT of syrup, which led to the hilarious twitter thread below. Click on it to see the academic discussion.

Sanchez admitted that her waffle galaxy may be “a bit too simplified” as a model. But the syrup is important.

“There’s actually tons of gas around really all galaxies, in what’s called the circumgalactic medium,” Sanchez said. The gas is important to the evolution of a galaxy. It feeds the black hole and helps form stars.

“I put a bunch of particles in a box, turn on gravity, and let time happen,” she laughed. After running a simulation she looks for a galaxy similar to the Milky Way, and examines interactions between the galaxy’s supermassive black hole and the circumgalactic medium.

“The supermassive black hole is actually really vital to the evolution of the CGM because it’s moving all of this metal that’s being created in the hearts of stars in the disk of the galaxy and it’s propagating them out into the CGM,” Sanchez explained. Without a supermassive black hole, the circumgalactic medium would not look like what astronomers have observed.

Emily Lakdawalla gushes with enthusiasm about the cool things to see and learn in our solar system, and for her that would be reason enough to explore those places.

“I’m just curious,” she told the Rose City Astronomers at their most recent meeting in Portland. “I like to see the new places, I like to see the planets. I think it’s awfully fun, but that’s not a good reason to make somebody else pay for it.”

Emily Lakdawalla (Isabel Lawrence/Planetary Society)

Lakdawalla, senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, said the public policy reasons for exploration are to answer the questions of how we got here and whether we’re alone in the universe. We need to find those answers off-planet.

“Earth is a wonderful planet to live on!” she said. “It’s my favorite planet; it’s temperate, it’s a very comfortable place to live. It’s also a terrible place to try to answer these questions from a planetary science point of view.”

That, she says, is because Earth is dynamic. Forces like weather and volcanism and even life and evolution change things and mess up the ancient evidence about how things were before. We need to go to space to find territory in a more undisturbed state.

After the first wave of planetary exploration, with Viking, Mariner, and the like, enthusiasm and political will and funding for planetary exploration waned. Lakdawalla explained that the Planetary Society was founded in 1980 to be an advocate for finding the answers. We’re now enjoying a second wave of exploration.

“Since the end of the second millennium, we’ve had this amazing expansion of robotic space explorers all over the solar system,” Lakdawalla said. She talked about many of them, with a particular emphasis on Mars. This is squarely within her bailiwick, as she is the author of the book The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Springer Praxis Books, 2018).

She explained how a series of Mars missions followed the water. Mars Global Surveyor made a map. Mars Odyssey detected evidence of hydrogen by analyzing neutron movement, and hydrogen could mean water. Phoenix went to look for water and found ice. Mars Express found places where there’s clay, evidence of water, in many places. Curiosity went to one of those places.

“Curiosity has found environments on Mars that are unequivocally habitable,” Lakdawalla said. “Curiosity is not capable of looking for fossil evidence of microbial life on Mars. It doesn’t have the instruments.”

While Curiosity continues its mission, Lakdawalla said we’ve pretty well exhausted this particular line of research.

“We have found that, yes, Mars could have originated life in the past, but we can’t tell you if there was life there or not,” she said. That question will be up to the next line of rovers, such as the ESA’s ExoMars and NASA’s Mars 2020.

Lakdawalla spent some time on the outer solar system, particularly the life possibilities on the jovian moons Ganymede and Europa and Saturnian moons Titan and Enceladus. She noted that on Titan the temperature is such that methane could exist on the surface in liquid, gas, or solid forms, much as water can exist on Earth. The Huygens probe found round rocks on Titan, a significant discovery for a geologist.

“We have a river, except it’s a bizarro river,” Lakdawalla said. “Those rocks are made of water ice, and the river they were tumbled in was a methane river. It’s so familiar and so completely bizarre.” She said it’s hard to say if life could exist in that strange environment. Another reason for further exploration!

Lakdawalla said she’d love to see a mission soon to either Uranus or Neptune.

“They don’t get enough respect,” she said. “I think they’re awesome worlds.” But remembering her statement that coolness alone isn’t enough of a reason for the trip, she noted that the ice worlds are at an intermediate size between the gas giants and the terrestrial planets.

“Most of the exoplanets that we have discovered in the last 30 years have been of this size,” Lakdawalla noted. “We’ve never studied up-close the ones in our own solar system except for one Voyager 2 fly-by. We don’t understand these worlds very well at all, so how are we going to understand the rest of the universe and all of these other planets orbiting all of these other stars?”

Lakdawalla concluded that it’s a great time to be in the planetary exploration business.

“We’re doing it for a reason; we’re trying to understand how we got here, whether we’re the only life in the solar system,” she said. “It’s just a wonderful field of study.”

The New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling through deep space toward its New Year’s Day encounter with the Kuiper Belt object “Ultima Thule,” a nickname which is better than the object’s official moniker of 2014 MU69. New Horizons collected amazing photos and data during a 2015 fly-by of Pluto, and I’ve just finished reading the account of that mission, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto (Picador, 2018). Penned by New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and astrobiologist and author David Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons is a fabulous read that tells the tale of the nearly 25 years it took to get the mission from a back-of-the-napkin concept to a real spacecraft that delivered those amazing images of the former ninth planet.

Stern and Grinspoon visited Seattle in May in support of the book. Grinspoon called the tale of New Horizons an unlikely story.

“The effort to send a mission to Pluto,” he said, “was one that had so many twists and turns, seeming dead ends, and inescapable traps that it’s still amazing to me that it happened.”

“I think there’s a lot of genuine suspense and drama, and yet, you know how it ends!” Grinspoon added. “It really is an adventure story as well as a nerd-fest of solving technical problems and ultimately succeeding spectacularly in this amazing exploration.”

The story truly is incredible. The New Horizons team that at its biggest included 2,500 people had to battle from the beginning. The first fight was simply getting approval just to do some preliminary work on a project as audacious as sending a mission to Pluto. They had to compete over whose proposed project would be selected, to get funding, to decide what science would happen, to actually build, launch, and fly the craft, to get it to the right place at the right time, and to deliver the science that was promised. Stern said they euphemistically referred to their challenges with the resident reptiles around the Kennedy Space Center in mind.

“There were so many alligators in the water at one point that we had no idea how we could solve all of the problems that we were having,” Stern said.

Yet—spoiler alert!—they did, and they accomplished it for a fraction of the cost of the Voyager mission, for example, and in a time frame that, by NASA standards, was break-neck.

Grinspoon (left) and Stern spoke about Chasing New Horizons at a Town Hall Seattle event at the Museum of Flight on May 17, 2018. Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Grinspoon interviewed Stern and more than two dozen others for the book, so it is really something of an oral history of New Horizons team members’ recollections of what happened along the amazing journey.

All of the jockeying makes for interesting storytelling, but the near loss of the mission just days before it’s Pluto fly-by, and how that was solved, is an incredible tale. Many of the team were taking a quick breather before the fly-by and trying to enjoy the Independence Day holiday when contact with New Horizons was lost. The work the team did to figure out what happened, to fix the problem, and to make sure the craft’s computers were ready for the complicated maneuvers ahead, is simply remarkable. Imagine doing that work around-the-clock with the whole mission hanging in the balance. For Stern, there was the real possibility that 25 years of work could go down the drain. That’s a whole lot of egg aimed right at your face. Cool heads, smart engineers, preparation, and a little luck prevailed. The science we got out of it is amazing.

“Pluto is an exotic, sci-fi world,” Stern said. “This book is a page-turner; it is a techno-thriller.”

You don’t necessarily want the author writing his own dust-jacket blurbs, but in this case we agree! Chasing New Horizons is highly recommended.

Last month New Horizons, about 100 million miles away from Ultima Thule, was able to spot its next destination with its own cameras, something the team announced on Twitter.

You can purchase Chasing New Horizons through the title link or by clicking the book cover image above. A small percentage of the fee comes to Seattle Astronomy and helps us create interesting astronomy stories. We thank you!

We tend to remember where we were at the time of major historical events, like when we found out that Elvis was dead or when a gimpy Kirk Gibson hit that home run against Dennis Eckersley to win the first game of the 1988 World Series. For space geeks and for anyone over age 56 or so, the ultimate such shared experience has to be when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. Estimates are that up to 600 million people worldwide and more than 130 million in the US alone watched the Moon landing on live television.

Your correspondent with the Apollo 11 command module Columbia last month at the St. Louis Science Center. Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Thus, it was a thrill for me to recently stand about a foot away from an amazing piece of space exploration history, the Apollo 11 “Columbia” command module, at the St. Louis Science Center. Columbia hadn’t left the Smithsonian since doing a national tour in the early 1970s, but the historic space capsule is part of a touring exhibit called Destination Moon that will visit four cities before returning to the National Air and Space Museum as part of a new comprehensive Apollo exhibit. The tour started last year in Houston and the St. Louis stop wraps up Sept. 3, 2018. It will be on display in Pittsburgh starting later this month and then—get this!—its final stop on the tour will be the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it will be on display beginning in March for a stay that will include the 50th anniversary date of the Moon landing. Huzzah!

The Destination Moon exhibit is great, with lots of information about how we got there, who the key players were, and why we did it. But the Columbia capsule was just completely mesmerizing, at least for me. I was a total space nut kid, kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of stories about the space flights, and was glued to the TV for launches and landings. Standing next to Columbia took me back to my almost-12 self. I dare say I was giddy in its presence. I spent a couple of hours in the exhibit, mostly just looking at this fabulous artifact.

There were a couple of other cool items in the exhibit. Aldrin’s helmet and gloves used on the Moon were there, as was a sample collection case in which he and Armstrong stowed their Moon rocks. They also have one injector plate from an Apollo engine, of they type around which the Museum of Flight has built its popular Apollo exhibit. Columbia’s escape hatch is on display separately from the capsule. There a collection of gear such as first-aid items and a survival kit in case the capsule splashed down far away from its target upon return to Earth. And, oh yes, there’s a Moon rock, too. Interestingly enough, I saw Moon rocks at both the St. Louis Science Center and Adler Planetarium in Chicago during a recent trip to the Midwest, and visitors showed little interest in either. THAT’S A HUNK OF THE MOON FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! OK, rant over. Maybe that’s not a big thing in the age of virtual reality and interactive exhibits. Alas.

Elsewhere in the St. Louis Science Center they have Mercury and Gemini capsules, too, and another current exhibit is Mission: Mars that is a lot of fun. The center is also home to the James S. McDonnell Planetarium, built in 1963 and named for the co-founder of McDonnell-Douglas, who kicked in a good chunk of change for equipment for the facility.

Membership has its priveleges; I got $1 off admission to Destination Moon thanks to my membership in the Museum of Flight. Parking would have been free had I driven, but I took public transit to the center.